internment means the state of being imprisoned, usually without trial.
internment is pronounced /ɪnˈtɝnmənt/.
Why “internment” is a great word
The state of being confined as a prisoner, especially of a group of people during wartime or political conflict, typically without formal charges or trial. From the verb 'intern' (to confine or imprison, especially during wartime) + the noun-forming suffix '-ment'; the verb 'intern' is from French 'interner', from Latin 'internus' ("inward, internal"). First attested in English in 1840. Unlike "incarceration," which implies a formal, adjudicated sentence, or "concentration camp," which denotes the brutal, specific architecture of mass detention, internment is the broader, chilling condition of being administratively vanished. It is the barbed-wire perimeter drawn around a community, the sudden revocation of a family's address, and the silent, bureaucratic filing of a person into a category rather than a cell. It is the state's quiet assertion that belonging can be revoked by policy, not by crime, turning the inward space of the camp into a captive's entire world.
Etymology
From intern + -ment.
noun
- The state of being imprisoned, usually without trial.e.g.“Policies that favor criminalization and internment are promoted over support for social transformation and equity.” — 1996 September, Randall Halle, “The Seduction of Nazism”, in Gay Community News, page 24:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.